


Lockdown

by thealexandriaarchives



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alcohol Cures All, Angst, Episode: s01e11 Boom Town, Gen, PTSD, Two People Trapped In A Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:39:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealexandriaarchives/pseuds/thealexandriaarchives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the events of the 'Boom Town', Jack puts the hub into Lockdown to avoid temptation. It's a good plan. Too bad he didn't know Owen was sleeping off a bender in the basements.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lockdown

**Author's Note:**

> Torchwood Era Jack's POV during Doctor Who Series 1 'Boomtown'.

3:52 AM

“Go home.”

The girls look up simultaneously, surprise cutting through the clouds of sleep deprivation on their faces.

Suzie spoke first. “Sorry, Jack?”

“I said go home. It’s late. I can finish up here, you two need to sleep.”

Tosh opens her mouth to object, but Suzie has already caught her arm and dragged her away from the console. It's a testament to her exhaustion that she doesn’t protest, putting her remaining concentration into not stumbling as she's pulled towards the door.

“And don’t come in tomorrow. Take the day off, both of you.”

They both freeze again, Suzie’s coat hanging off one shoulder.

“Jack…”

“I’m sure the world won’t end if you take a Friday off. I did survive before you two, you know.”

Neither one of them looked convinced.

Jack sighed. “Don’t worry, I’ll get Owen to help me. It’s only fair you take a day off when he’s skipping work to go out and get drunk every other night, especially when you have to cover for him.”

Tosh looked guilty, and turned to fiddle with her laptop bag.

“Well, all right Jack, if you’re sure,” Suzie said reluctantly, “But don’t you dare not call us if you need us.”

Her demand was met by a cheeky grin. “Would I ever?”

He stood and watched silently as they disappeared behind the elevator door.

*******************************************************************************************

4:13 AM

On a couch in an abandoned storeroom in the lower levels, Owen Harper woke with a start.

It took him a minute to figure out why, and that the throbbing noise penetrating through his skull wasn’t just his hang-over.

Someone had triggered the Hub Lockdown.

Swearing, Owen quickly swung his legs off the side of the couch, sitting up. He regretted it immediately.

He could tell that he was still fairly drunk, and his hang-over induced migraine had by no means reached its peak, but was still bad enough to blur his vision. Pulling himself to his feet he immediately stumbled into the low table in front of him. Great. Now he had the added advantage that if something was attacking the base, his aim would be shaky.

He unhooked his torch from his belt, wincing as the strong and sudden light made his head throb harder. Reluctantly, he pulled out his sidearm too, taking more care than usual not to shoot himself in the foot as he switched off the safety.

Quietly exiting the storeroom he made his way into the hall. He was still a good three levels beneath the main Hub, he’d have to clear each floor before he could head upstairs. Wincing as the added hallway alarm lights stabbed, rather than cut through his migraine, he realized he had no idea what time it was. Had he missed his shift? If not then he could just say he was clearing the lower levels of-whatever it was they were under attack from. Probably not. At least he could say he’d cleared the lower levels of whatever they were under attack from.

After a basic sweep established that the archive, storerooms, and cells were empty, (except for that Weevil Jack had brought in last week…Janice?), Owen cautiously climbed the stairs to the top floor.

It was as dark and deserted as the lower levels.

The first part was to be expected as the lockdown cut all power, but the lack of people, monsters or amorphous blobs was rather disturbing.

A quick scan of the room confirmed he was alone. Deciding to risk it, Owen called out in a hoarse whisper.

“Tosh? Susie? …Harkness, are you there?”

Well that was something. Even if he was alone at least he wasn’t slurring.

Keeping a watchful eye out, he made his way over to the nearest PC terminal. A quick keystroke reaffirmed that yes, all systems were down. Power was out, the armory and all the exits were locked. Assuming he’d woken up just as the lockdown started, he’d taken about an hour to come up from the basement…he had another 22 ½ hours before the lockdown reversed itself.

First things first, get himself into better shape. If he knew Toshiko, she always had…

“Oh, Bless You, Tosh,” Owen murmured, downing three of the caffeine pills she always kept on her desk, grinding them beneath his teeth to make them take effect faster. The coffee here always sucked anyway.

Next problem: Where was everyone? Were they hiding, or dead, or…gone? Oh, Shit. Had they left him locked down here alone with some…some…he didn’t even know what the fuck he was dealing with here! Oh, shit. Shit Shit Shit Shit SHIT.

Trying hard not to hyperventilate, Owen carefully made his way up the stairs towards the conference room.

‘Stay Calm, Harper, Stay Calm. Think about this rationally.’

Surveying the hub below him, Owen looked for signs of a struggle. There were no streaks of blood down the walls, overturned furniture or destroyed equipment lying around, and no smell of gunpowder in the air. In fact, there was nothing besides the ordinary mess that encompassed the Hub every day.

Relaxing slightly, he lowered his gun slightly and turned to check out the hothouse.

No sooner had he turned his back then he heard as faint crash. Instantly on high alert again, all semblance of calm out the window, breathing hard yet trying desperately to keep quiet, back flat to the wall, he tried to locate the origin of the sound.

Within a few seconds he realized it was coming from Jack’s office and reluctantly started edging towards it, maintaining his death grip on the gun, blood and the klaxons pounding in his ears.

He got within twenty meters of the door, still flush against the wall, eyes darting furiously all around him. Everything seemed quiet…

Owen suddenly got the sickening feeling he always got while watching stupid people in horror movies, and now far too often in this new job: That something was right behind him.

Within microseconds of this realization, he spun and targeted his sights at the shadowy figure in the doorway behind him. Adrenaline pumping, he pulled off two shots, unable to tell if his hands were shaking from the chemical rush, the fear or the booze. Probably some lovely mix of all three.

There was a muffled thump as something big hit the ground and glass shattered.

Owen couldn’t, or didn’t move for a good minute, listening hard for any signs of movement or a second creature.

Cautiously, he started to move back towards the hothouse, greeted only by the sounds of silence and the unrelenting shriek of the lockdown klaxons.

Taking a deep breath, he quickly spun around the door, shining his light down on…

…Harkness?

He wasn’t moving, lying flat on his back in a very undignified sprawl that Owen would be sure to mock him for, when he figured out what the Hell was going on.

Making a final sweep of the room and the areas directly behind him, Owen hesitantly laid his gun on the floor beside him to check on Jack.

He couldn’t tell if he was breathing from here, but one of Owen’s shots had hit him high in the left thigh, and he was gushing blood. At least that meant his heart was still beating…for now.

Confirming this sentiment with a quick pulse check, (racing, but still fairly strong), Owen surveyed the damage. It looked like one of his bullets, (probably the second), had hit Jack’s femoral artery, shredding it, and coming far too close to for comfort to severing it before hitting bone and shattering. He frowned. There was something wrong with this picture, but he couldn’t quite figure it out, nor did he have time to sit around thinking, Jack was going to bleed out if he didn’t do something.

Glancing around the room for something to use as a tourniquet, he settled on the bag of rags fixed to the back wall they used to wipe down the hothouse windows.

Digging through the bag for a cloth of suitable length, strength, and hopefully moderate cleanliness Owen noticed something catching the light of his torch, buried in the wall. It was a bullet, most likely from the first shot he had fired. There was blood on it, and it had definitely hit something solid before the wall…

Frowning, Owen made some quick calculations. The bullet was about six feet above the ground, and from where Harkness was lying…

He was distracted by a groan from the unconscious man on the floor.

“Jack!” He whispered furiously, “What the Bloody Hell is going on!?”

Harkness, being the complete idiot that he was, not only seemed unaware of Owen’s presence, but the gaping wound in his thigh, groping around in the darkness for…something.

“Harkness!” Owen hurried back to Jack’s side to help to him a sitting position against a table. He heard the sound of glass crunching beneath his feet and looked down. The remains of a shot glass were ground further into the floor by his boot. That explained the crash he’d heard after he’d fired.

Jack groaned again, the first sound he’d made acknowledge the other human present, hands still feeling blindly around the floor. Owen, thinking he was looking for his pistol, motioned to it, still strapped to his leg. Jack stared at blankly, shaking his head.

Forcing Harkness’s legs into a position to staunch the blood flow as best he could, Owen started ripping the fabric of Jack’s trousers around the wound to get a better look at it. Jack let out a crow that Owen would have interpreted as pain, but glancing up saw him grabbing at the overturned half-empty bottle of whiskey that had fallen but not shattered a few feet away. Pulling the cork out and spitting it out in a manner that was so ridiculously reminiscent of an old west saloon scene, Owen snorted.

“Can you help me get you up? We have to get you to autopsy, I can’t do anything here.”

Nodding, Jack took a long drag from the bottle before allowing the other man to help him to his feet, heavily supported on his right side. Owen paused to pick up his handgun from the ground, and somehow the two managed to make the two story, 500 yard trip to the autopsy room, Jack holding his iron grip on his whiskey bottle in his left hand, right arm slung round Owen’s neck, pointing the torch in the general direction of forward while Owen strained against Jack’s weight, Gun at the ready.

Walking proved more difficult than Owen had anticipated. Jack was even drunker than he was, and now besides trying to keep his own balance he had to support the weaving of an unevenly balanced two-hundred pound man captain, all while navigating circular staircases, grate flooring and strewn pizza boxes.

They really needed an elevator. And a maid.

Finally, however, they made it, and helped Jack collapse on the table.

Switching on the high power lights, (which thankfully ran on battery power, he didn’t want to operate in the dark too), Owen prepped a painkiller, but Jack waved him off with a shaky grin. “Doesn’t mix well with alcohol,” he said, reaching for the bottle again, before Owen stopped him.

“We’re still under a lockdown! What’s going on anyway?! Where are Tosh and Suzie?!”

“Eh? Oh, it’s nothing. I sent the girls home and triggered the lockdown.”

Relief and extreme annoyance coursed through Owen. “Nothing?!” He finally dared to raise his voice a little louder to be heard over the screeching alarms. Remembering the crisis at hand, he finished cutting off the blood-stained trousers.

“You triggered a complete lockdown over Nothing?!”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Jack shrugged, finishing the drink Owen had so rudely interrupted before.

“Why are you here, anyway? I thought you were AWOL today. And you’re just as drunk as I am. And performing surgery?” Jack tsked. “Bad Doctor.”

Annoyed, Owen splashed more rubbing alcohol than was strictly necessary to sanitize the wound over Jack’s leg. Even drunk and bleeding to death, Harkness was still a pain in the ass. Of course he would notice.

Jack just laughed and took another swig of whiskey. Glancing up from his work, Owen noticed a little more than half of the bottle was gone. He had no idea how it had started.

“Yeah, well I think the Adrenaline’s cutting through most of the booze,” he muttered. “Y’know, since someone triggered an emergency lockdown and made me think we had a rampaging killer alien locked in with me.”

Owen pulled out a sixth bullet fragment, dropping it into the dish beside him and started to apply sutures.

“Why did you do that again? We’re now stuck in here until…”

“4:08 AM tomorrow morning,” Jack finished smoothly. It is now coming up on 6:45 AM.”

Frowning at the odd look on his face, Owen moved up and started checking Jack’s head for injuries.

“You think I’ve got a concussion?”

“No,” Owen replied easily, “I think you’re nuts. But…” He continued to run his fingers through the hair on the sides of Jack’s head,” I fired two shots at you. The second is pretty obvious, but I found the first lodged in the wall, six feet up,” he let and stepped back to assess Jack with a frown, “With blood on it.”

Jack’s grin didn’t waiver. “Maybe I scabbed up already.”

“Maybe,” Owen said, returning to Jack’s leg, “But I should be able to find the scab.”

Clearing his throat loudly, Jack changed the subject.

“So, Doc. Am I about good to go here?”

“Hardly.” Owen’s frown deepened. “We’ve got to find a way to break lockdown and get you to a hospital. I was able to pull out all the bullet fragments, but your artery’s hanging on by threads. I can’t do anything about that here.”

“Nah…” Jack drawled, taking another draught. “I’ll be fine. We get out of here in under 22 hours. You can check me out then and if I still need something I’ll go then.”

Owen checked his watch. 21 hours, 10 minutes. By his estimate Jack would bleed out internally in less than 7 hours.

Half an hour later, Owen had managed to get Tosh’s backup laptop up and running by jerry-rigging the battery power from the operating room’s lights to an AC adaptor.

“When we get out of this I’m going to kiss Tosh,” he said seriously.

Jack, still lying on the exam table, laughed slightly. “She’ll like that.”

Ignoring him, Owen pulled up the hub mainframe. “The point is, I can finally get those goddamn alarms off, and maybe the lights on, and maybe, if I’m very, very good, get a communication line or jimmy open a window to get us out of here.”

Silence met his confidence.

“Ah ha! Gotcha!”

A second later, the Klaxons were silent for the first time in three hours. It gave a strange emptiness to the hub, but neither of them wanted it back.

“How’d you do that?” Jack asked curiously. “You’re not supposed to be able to do that during a lockdown.”

Owen grinned, “I couldn’t turn them off, so I lowered the volume down to next to nothing. It’ll still be giving Janice hell downstairs, but we can’t hear a thing.”

“Janice? What?”

“The Weevil? You named her.”

“Oh. …Nice. I knew there was a reason I hired you.”

Turning back to the laptop screen, Owen’s grin faded slightly.

“Getting the rest of the systems back online is going to be a lot harder though. There’s a dozen failsafes and failsafes for those, and good as I may be, I’m not Tosh. Hell, I’m not even Suzie. This could take time.”

Leaning back again and reaching for the nearly empty bottle on the medical tray, Jack gestured towards the screen.

“Let’s see you get on with it then boy wonder.”

Twenty minutes later, Owen was no closer to anything. In fact, he may have inadvertently given Tosh’s laptop a virus and deleted a couple of her files.

After the sixth time he had sworn loudly, the fourth time he’d slapped the innocent computer and the eighth time an overintoxicated Jack had laughed at him he was ready for a distraction.

“You ready to tell me why you decided locking yourself in the hub for a day and night to drink alone in the dark struck you as a particularly good idea?”

“Nope.” Jack said cheerfully.

“Well Harkness, I don’t know about you, but I would really rather like to go home and sleep off this hangover, and I’d like to get you to a hospital so you don’t bleed to death and leave Suzie in charge, because honestly, that scares the shit out of me, so if you’re not willing to help me how about at least giving me something to do to distract me, all right?”

Jack laughed again. “Here,” he said, extending his nearly empty bottle, “Have a drink.”

Sighing, Owen couldn’t think of a reason to decline, walked over to retrieve the bottle and drained it in a gulp.

The man reclined below him grinned.

“There’s another bottle in my office.”

Heading back down the steps from Jack’s office, Owen paused. There was something weird happening. A strange, mechanical, faintly grinding, whooshing noise, loud in the new silence of the Hub. Maybe it was a street cleaner up above on the Plass, but it was like no street cleaner he had ever heard before.

“Hey Jack, you hear that?”

There was no reply.

Hurrying down the stairs to the autopsy room, Owen found Jack pale and seemingly frozen in place, staring up at the ceiling.

“Jack?”

“We’re going to breakfast with Mickey Mouse.”

“What?” Concerned, Owen felt for a fever. There was one, but it was fairly slight, couldn’t be above 100.

“Nevermind. Gimme that bottle.”

“No way. I brought shot glasses.”

Three shots a piece each later, Jack turned to the skinny man on the folding chair beside him and clasped him on the shoulder.

“Thanks. This might actually be a good thing.”

“Thanks for what? Letting a patient in critical condition get drunk off his ass?”

Actually he was secretly hoping it would help constrict the bloodflow, giving Jack a few more hours for him to figure something out.

“Nah. Thanks for shooting me.”

Owen barked out a laughed.

“You do realize I’ve probably killed you, right?”

Now it Jack’s turn to laugh.

“Yeah, no big deal. You’ve kept me from doing something stupid far more effectively than I ever could have.”

Staring disbelievingly, Owen bit: “Oh? And what is that?”

“Running out there and screwing up the space-time continuum and all that fun stuff, “ he answered, settling himself further back into the seat back.

“Can’t run if I can’t walk, no matter how much I want to.”

“That’s why you triggered the lockdown? And why would you want to destroy the space-time continuum anyway?”

Jack just motioned to the bottle on Owen’s side of the medical tray that was serving as a bar.

“Your turn to pour the shots.”

*******************************************************************************************

The rest of the morning and the early afternoon passed fairly easily, the two of them passing out for a few hours of much-needed if not well-deserved sleep.

Owen woke up around 4:30 to the sound of Jack groaning.

“Jack?”

He was covered in sweat, breathing hard, and it looked like some of his sutures had broken. His lower body was covered in a fresh coat of blood.

“Shit! Why the hell didn’t you wake me?!”

Jack looked up at him, a dazed and confused look in his eyes. “Why is it taking so long? It’s never taken this long…”

“What are you talking about Harkness?”

Owen felt Jack’s forehead again. It was burning up.

“Shit. SHIT.”

Quickly reapplying his bandages, Owen handed Jack a water bottle and some Tylenol to get his fever down. As he obediently swallowed them, Owen realized he hadn’t had anything to eat besides whiskey for at least twelve hours.

“Stay here,” he said unnecessarily, “I’m going to find you something to eat that your stomach can handle.”

Heading up to the main Hub, Owen searched in vain for food.

Since the power had been out for almost twelve hours, he didn’t trust anything in the refridgerator, but that didn’t leave much choice.

A box of half eaten Pad Thai with a bug that he wasn’t sure was terrestrial in nature already chowing down, or two pieces of sad looking pizza crust.

The pizza was probably easier to handle and less likely to be contaminated, he was fairly sure it was from last night.

Jogging back down to the operating room, he found Jack with a blade an inch from his wrist.

“What the Fuck do you think you’re Doing?!” Owen nearly roared.

Looking up at him, Jack smiled weakly and dropped the scalpel.

“Seriously, Jack! I’ve spent the last twelve hours in here trying to keep you alive, I turn my back for a minute and you pull a stunt like this?! What the fuck were you thinking?!”

“That you’d be gone longer,” Jack mumbled, grinning faintly.

“That’s not fucking funny, Harkness.”

Jack tried to sigh dramatically, but it just came out weak and tired.

“I can’t die.”

“Yeah, right,” Owen agreed angrily. “You keep this shit up and I’ll kill you myself, you hear?”

“No, really. I’m immortal.”

“You’re immortally stupid, but I’ll forgive you because you’ve got a raging fever, a ridiculous amount of bloodloss, and I’ve still not given up on finding that head trauma.”

“It’d fix me.”

“Eat this and go back to sleep, Harkness. You’re not dying today.”

*******************************************************************************************

Jack didn’t go back to sleep, but he didn’t die either. Owen was amazed that anyone could survive that amount of bloodloss for so prolonged a time, but he wasn’t going to be the one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

A few hours later, around nine PM. Jack’s fever began to intensify. He started to babble.

“Y’know today was one of the best days of my life? Today and tomorrow. After that it all falls to shit.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“He leaves. He leaves, and she leaves, and I’m alone.”

“…”

“They were going to blow it up. Stupid people. Too little, Too late, but they were going to blow it up.”

“Blow what up, Jack?”

“The Gamestation. They didn’t know it was over. Radar couldn’t penetrate their fucked-up atmosphere. All they knew was they’d received a warning the Daleks were coming and now they weren’t getting anything at all.”

“The what?”

“When he left the translations left with him. My patrols were 3000-8000A.D. I didn’t speak the dialect, but I recognized the word ‘Bomb’. I tried to send a message, but my translation was so garbled they probably thought it was one of the Daleks themselves.

So I just sat there. No more pods. No escape. Just bodies and quiet and the countdown coming in over the radio.”

Jack suddenly broke out of his reverie and grabbed at Owen’s arm.

“I was the only one left. Just me. No one else came back. Just me. Everyone else was dead or gone and I…I…”

Owen knew it was probably just a fever nightmare, but it still ran a chill down his back.

“Let me bleed out.”

That snapped him out of it.

“Not in a hundred thousand years, you got that Harkness?”

That just made him laugh again. He let go of Owen’s arm and flopped back again.

“Trust me, it’d be easier. I’d be fine. You don’t even have to do anything. Just…  
It doesn’t matter. It’ll happen anyway. It’d just be easier for the both of us if it happened sooner rather than later.”

“Here, drink this.”

Jack quickly slipped into unconsciousness from the sedative Owen had given him.

Much as it pained him to admit it, Jack was probably right. It was going to happen whether he liked it or not.

But damned if it was going to happen any sooner than he could prevent.

His last thought before he fell asleep in the chair a few minutes later, was that Jack really did look dead from here.

*******************************************************************************************

He was literally jolted awake an indeterminate amount of time later when the world began to move.

The ground was shaking violently, and his first thought was that the Rift had finally had enough of fucking Cardiff and was going to swallow the city whole.

“Jack!”

Jack wasn’t moving, and his face was ashy grey, but before Owen could check for a pulse the ceiling of the autopsy room split open and rubble and tile from the Plass above started streaming down.

Grabbing Jack and slinging him on his back in a fireman’s pose, he headed down the stairs to the morgue, ostensibly the safest place in the Hub besides the cells.

The ceiling was splitting here too. Owen saw a crack open up from the fountain all the way out past the edges of the Hub, and noticed, wincing, a piece of the ceiling crash down onto Tosh’s computer desk, flattening it and everything on it.

Oh well. At least if he survived this he wouldn’t have to explain what had happened to her laptop.

Beside him, Jack gasped loudly and sat straight up. His color looked better, Owen noticed, but he was still flushed and obviously in pain.

A strange light was shining through the cracks in the ceiling, and even through the rumbling chaos you could clearly hear the screaming.

Jack hadn’t moved, simply stood in the corner of the morgue, occasionally ducking to avoid falling rocks, or yelled at Owen to jump when he was in danger.

Within ten minutes, the whole ordeal was over. The lights disappeared, the ground quieted, and though there was still screaming up above, it seemed as if the worst was over.

Jack had slid back down against the wall, breathing heavily.

“Jack?! You all right?!”

The alarms were blaring again, signaling the lockdown had been breached.

“Jack? The lockdown’s broken. We can get out.”

Jack shook his head violently, tears streaming down his face. Whether it was from the pain or something else, Owen couldn’t tell.

“We have to get you to a hospital. You’re going to die otherwise.”

“No, please. I can’t leave. Not yet.”

It seemed a moot point. Jack had passed out again and Owen no longer had the strength to carry him.

Jack was shivering in his sleep, his body desperately trying to sweat out the fever.

Owen got up and picked his way through the wreckage of the Hub to get a blanket from the autopsy room. At the last second he picked up the bottle of whiskey too.

Making his way back, he spread the blanket over his captain’s shaking frame. He winced in his sleep as the blanket fell over his leg. Gently, Owen removed the bandages.

The wound had almost completely healed over, fresh pink skin throbbing angrily with unpleasant looking black lump visible.

Frowning and reaching into his pocket for the scalpel he had confiscated from Jack, Owen carefully reopened the no-longer-a-wound. A seventh chunk of bullet, probably previously buried under a muscle and dislodged by the exertions of the hour was pressing against a major nerve and cutting into the femoral artery, now almost completely healed.

Pulling it out gently with his bare hands, Owen watched as the wound began to heal before his eyes and Jack’s breathing evened out.

Throwing the scrap of metal away, he collapsed down next to Jack, resting his head on the bank of coffins behind him.

Outside he could hear Suzie and Tosh.

“Jack? Jack it’s Suzie! Can you hear us?! The roof in front of the door collapsed. We’ll get you out of there in no time. Jack, are you there?”

He reached for the bottle of whiskey, pulled out the cork with his teeth and spat it out, and took a long drag straight from the neck.

Just another day at the office.


End file.
